Samsung just unveiled a 16TB SSD, the largest hard drive in the world

It’s really exciting to see how quickly SSD technology is progressing. Samsung has been responsible for a significant chunk of the progress we’ve seen so far and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon. At the Flash Memory Summit in California this week, the company unveiled a new 2.5-inch SSD with a whopping 16TB of storage, making it not just the largest SSD in the world, but the largest single hard drive in the world. 

Gone are the days when you have to sacrifice size for speed with an SSD drive in your laptop. At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung just revealed a new 2.5-inch SSD drive with an incredible 16 terabytes of storage. It’s not only the world’s largest SSD—it’s actually now the world’s largest hard drive, period. So how on Earth did Samsung pull off a such an incredible feat? Inside the PM1633a SSD you’ll find stacks and stacks of the company’s latest and greatest 256Gbit NAND flash dies, which are twice the capacity of the 128Gbit NAND flash dies currently in use. According to Ars Technica’s calculations, there should be somewhere around 480 to 500 of the dies inside Samsung’s new SSD. Which is even more impressive given it still fits inside a 2.5-inch housing, although it’s probably a lot taller than most.